President Obama Votes Present on Immigration Reform

5 July 2010One Comment

Last Thursday President Obama acknowledged during his speech on comprehensive immigration reform that under Washington’s failed leadership legal immigration had become a fallacy, as we have been reporting here and here.

As the President stated, “More fundamentally, the presence of so many illegal immigrants makes a mockery of all those who are going through the process of immigrating legally. Indeed, after years of patchwork fixes and ill-conceived revisions, the legal immigration system is as broken as the borders.”

That’s right. The legal immigration system has grown into a boondoggle. For over 200 years people from around the globe have flocked to America in search of the American dream but over the last couple of decades, as millions of illegal aliens crossed the unsecured borders, the American dream was mired and crushed under the cruel weight of incompetent ever-changing government bureaucracy for countless legal immigrants. This actuality does not only negatively impact legal immigrants; it adversely affects national security and the economy. Americans should be concerned. So what did President Obama propose to fix this federal-government made disaster that metastasized under both Republican and Democrat rule? He didn’t say.

What was strikingly absent from President Obama’s 4,101- word immigration reform speech was the fact that the USCIS is on the front lines of America’s defense. Indeed, something must be done.

So while MSNBC anchor Alex Witt “got a few chills” listening to President Obama’s “very powerful” speech on immigration. What is really chilling is there are terrorists and other assorted criminals exploiting America’s broken legal immigration system-the USCIS. As previously reported here, terrorists are applying for green cards, and, as reported here, radical Islamic terrorists use the broken immigration system to gain entry via phony marriages, and by exploiting student visas for example. Now that’s chilling.

In his speech, President Obama called the Arizona immigration law “ill-conceived” and “unenforceable.” He also said, “We can create a pathway for legal status that is fair, reflective of our values, and work,” but he declined to mention that it is the USCIS, home of the legal immigration system boondoggle that would process the millions of illegal aliens already in the U.S. Isn’t it “ill-conceived” to expect an agency would be able to process millions of illegal aliens capably when it cannot process legal immigrants competently? Apparently not.

In the real world, however, as Stephen Dinan at the Washington Times reported, Homeland Security Assistant Inspector General Frank Deffer recently told the House Judiciary Committee’s immigration subcommittee, “Adding 12 million more people to the system would be the mother of all backlogs. Clearly to us the systems could not handle it now. It’s going to take a few years, so it’s something for Congress to consider…”

Meanwhile, playing politics with immigration prevails regardless of the realities on the ground. The Service Employees International Union (SEIU), for instance, who advocates legalization, released what appears to be a political statement after President Obama’s speech, “The only way we can deliver the immigration solutions that a vast majority of Americans support is if Republicans stop obstructing… It’s time for Republicans… to stand up and lead,” the SEIU said, which was odd considering President Obama is not Republican and the House and Senate are controlled by Democrats.

In the meantime, with or without comprehensive immigration reform, beneath President Obama’s lofty rhetoric, he was accomplishing something that is paramount to all politicians—getting votes. First, by appeasing special interest groups by calling for the path to citizenship that Washington is ill-equipped to handle, and also when he said, “…we’ve stemmed the increases in naturalization fees…”

You see, President Obama was purposefully selective with his statement, because last month, as the New York Times reported, the Obama administration proposed an overall fee increase for legal immigration documents.

Alejandro Mayorkas, director of Citizenship and Immigration Services, said the fee increase was necessary because declining applications for documents in the past two years had lowered revenues and left his agency — which is 90 percent financed by fees — with a budget shortfall of about $200 million…

Except there was one particular fee which was exempt from this latest increase, and that’s naturalization; the Obama Administration has “kept the fee for immigrants to become United States citizens unchanged.”
James R. Edwards Jr., of the Center for Immigration Studies, wrote this about President Obama’s speech: “The President’s call-for-amnesty- speech… should raise one main question in every American’s mind: Whose side is President Obama on?

President Obama may have voted present in his immigration speech but his priorities were clear. He was looking out for himself.

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